Splinter Cell: Double Agent Multiplayer Hands-on

When Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow hit Xbox three years back, the game brought mixed reactions from gameplayers. The single-player game had it moments, but it was the multiplayer games that garnered near unanimous positive results. The co-op play showed signs of greatness, which was extended in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, yet another in a long list of highly rated Tom Clancy games from Ubisoft. While a few grievers griped about the two titles' ramped-up difficulty level, a majority took the toughness as a challenge, and kept plugging away, despite the often huge gap of skill levels that often occurred on Xbox Live, if you didn't bring your friends to play.

The Ubisoft Annecy and Ubisoft Milan teams, like always, have studied the reviews, listened to their communities, digested the feedback, and in response, have created a dual-layer multiplayer experience that they hope will make it easier for noobs to jump in and play, yet still deep and challenging for experienced sharks to sharpen their serrated hand knives to. Using the Versus modes as its basis, Ubisoft once again delves into the adversarial Upsilon Mercenaries Vs. Echelon Spies territory, enabling up to three people on a team (six altogether) to play as either military defenders or gadget-dependent stealth spies to infiltrate and defend an abundance of structures, houses, and HQs.